PhotoEZ Cloud

AI-assisted studio software for photographers, live at photoezcloud.com. Booking, proofing galleries, contracts, invoices and payments in one place, with AI that does the busywork: sorting inquiries and drafting replies, finding the right shots, flagging the ones to cut, and answering questions about the studio.

PhotoEZ Cloud is the SaaS successor to the PhotoEZ WordPress plugin suite, which I built and sell through EJS Tech. The plugins give photographers galleries, booking, contracts, and invoicing on their own sites. This project rebuilds the whole workflow as a hosted app and puts AI features at the center.

Live at photoezcloud.com. Photographers can sign up, take real payments through Stripe, and deliver galleries today; it runs on a VPS with zero-downtime deploys and nightly off-site backups. Free plan, and a 14-day Pro trial with no card.

AI features

Each one has an eval built from real studio work, run before any change to the prompt or model ships. The evals live in web/evals.

Feature	What it does	How it works	Measured
Inquiry triage	Reads a new inquiry, pulls out the session type, date, budget and questions, flags what needs the photographer, and drafts a reply	Claude with structured outputs; replies point to the booking page and FAQ instead of quoting prices	Reply safe to send: 88% → 96%; never missed an inquiry that needed the photographer (eval)
Gallery search	Finds photos from plain words like "first dance" or "girl in a blue dress"	Claude Haiku tags each photo with everyday words; whole-word, phrase-aware Postgres search	No wrong matches: 70% → 93% (eval)
Culling help	Flags blurry frames, too dark/bright, missed flash, closed eyes, and near-duplicates before the client sees them	Runs in the photographer's browser at no server cost: tile sharpness, exposure percentiles (so low-key portraits and darker skin tones aren't flagged), difference hashes, and a face-landmark model	Tested on real galleries
Studio Assistant	Answers "which galleries expire this week?" and acts on it, like drafting reminder emails	Claude tool use; every action waits on the photographer's Approve card, checked in code, with full step traces	No made-up info: 96% (eval, architecture)

Every AI call is recorded with its token cost, so each studio's AI use is tracked against its plan's allowance (cost tracking).

Everything else

• Booking: real open times, deposits and payment plans, reschedules, custom questions, and inspiration photos
• Galleries: watermarked proofs, client favorites and notes, paid extra photos, clean full-resolution delivery, and slideshows
• Business: contracts signed online, quotes and invoices, gift cards, coupons, session credits, review requests, and text reminders
• Studio page: each photographer's own page and booking form, styled with a page designer, plus a directory where nearby clients find them
• Moving in: a migration tool that moves a studio between PhotoEZ for WordPress and PhotoEZ Cloud
• Store: clients order photo prints and gifts from their gallery, made and shipped by SwaggPress Creations or by the studio itself

Stack

• App: Next.js 16, TypeScript, Tailwind
• Data: PostgreSQL 18 with Drizzle ORM; photos on Cloudflare R2
• Auth: Better Auth
• Payments: Stripe Connect (clients pay each photographer directly, 0% commission) and Stripe Billing (plans)
• AI: Claude API (Opus for inquiry triage, Sonnet for the Assistant, Haiku for photo tags); MediaPipe in the browser for culling
• Messaging: SMTP email and Twilio texts, from each studio's own account
• Tests: Node's test runner with an in-memory Postgres (PGlite), 260+ tests
• Hosting: a Linux VPS with blue/green deploys (no downtime, one-command rollback) and nightly backups copied off-site and restore-tested

About

Built by Elle Jones, Full-Stack AI Engineer in Portland, OR, and founder of EJS Tech. Elle is also a working photographer, which is where these features come from.